Today, in the government of the Arkhangelsk region, the Moscow mayor’s office presented a project for the removal of the capital's garbage to the region. According to the document, the city authorities plan to bury 10 million tons of briquetted household waste in the Lensky District of the Arkhangelsk Region. As follows from the project to create an ecotechnopark "Shies" worth 10.5 billion rubles, the city authorities promise their Arkhangelsk colleagues not only an increase in budget revenues and new jobs, but also help in solving the problem of household garbage in the region. The industry experts interviewed by Kommersant questioned the environmental safety of the project, but the Moscow authorities insist that its technical characteristics exclude harm to the environment.

According to the draft of the Moscow government, which is presented today in Arkhangelsk (available to Kommersant), 500 thousand tons (out of about 8 million tons generated in the capital) household waste will be transported annually for 20 years by Russian Railways and stored at the Shies railway station in the Lensky district of the Arkhangelsk region, with the government of which an agreement was reached.

The project is called innovative. The meaning of innovation (it has been used in various industries since the 1970s) is the briquetting of waste with the help of Swedish and German equipment, which allows hermetically packed garbage in cellophane film. The environmental benefits of such a method of processing, transporting and disposing of waste are “the absence of odors and dispersal” and the possibility of reclaiming the area after the burial of briquettes at the Arkhangelsk test site, the document says.

The project mentions that before being sent to the Arkhangelsk region, waste from all over Moscow is planned to be collected in an “eco cluster”, which should appear on the territory of the Lyubertsy treatment facilities. There they will be sorted, crushed, and then pressed and sealed in film. In a similar way, Moscow officials promise to solve the waste problem of the Arkhangelsk region by spending from the Moscow budget for 2018–2020 the launch of the ecological technology park “Shies” 10.5 billion rubles, creating 500 jobs (the cost of creating one place is 21 million rubles) from an average salary 44 thousand rubles. and providing 912.1 billion rubles. additional tax revenues to the regional budget for six years.

As “Kommersant” has reported, residents of the Arkhangelsk region have been opposing the construction of the facility at Shies station for several months: they regularly go to rallies and pickets, including in Kotlas (more than 160 km from Shies station), as well as in the village of Urdoma and Koryazhma.

The metropolitan area faced the problem of garbage after the planned closure of several landfills in the Moscow region: since 2013, municipal garbage stopped taking 24 of the 39 landfills. In June 2017, the largest landfill Kuchino (Balashikha) was closed. This increased the load on the remaining 15 landfills, led to disruptions in garbage collection, environmental problems and protests of citizens living in the vicinity of landfills. Authorities plan to partially solve the problem with the construction of four incinerators in the Moscow region, but they should appear only by 2022.

“Moscow has fallen into a hopeless situation when it is almost impossible to take rubbish to landfills in the Moscow region, because they have exhausted their capacities,” says Alexey Makrushin, head of the association of organizations and housing and public utilities specialists. “To dump garbage to another region is one of the few options to solve the problem of the capital waste. " Igor Teryushkov, President of the Ecorecycling Interregional Industrial Corporation, calls the current situation in the field of waste management in the metropolitan region catastrophic. “The ecotechnopark project cannot be called the final stage of utilization of municipal waste, but in modern realities it can be a salvation for Moscow and the Moscow region,” Mr. Teryushkov notes.

According to the project, the landfill at Shies station will be located at a distance of 20 km to the nearest residential area (Madmas village) and 35 km from Urdoma village.

According to Alexei Makrushin, residents of the Arkhangelsk region will not feel any problems associated with waste: “Not a mountain of garbage will be dumped, but neat, sealed cubes”.

The government of Moscow assures that the technology of such storage allows to ensure the ecological safety of briquettes for more than 30 years, “which is confirmed by theoretical studies of German universities and practical testing abroad in different climatic zones with temperature fluctuations and zero crossings, with different types of storage: temporary open-air to burial underground. "

Industry experts question the environmental safety of the project. “If organic waste remains in the briquettes, then the bill will go not for 30 years, but only for a few months,” says one of the Kommersant interlocutors. which could cause an explosion or fire. " “There is a huge dump in the Arkhangelsk region,” says Igor Fraynt, adviser to the general director of Standard Recycling Group. “This waste is still 4–5 hazard classes. When buried in the ground, this is a time mine: everything will rot, and a filtrate will be formed. ” He believes that this variant of waste management will also lead to a disturbance of the ecological situation in Lyubertsy: “A huge amount of garbage is planned to be dumped there, which they simply cannot manage to sort, and at the initial stage rotting will begin”.

“One site will not sustain such a volume of waste,” notes one of the Kommersant interlocutors in the industry. “A ton of unpressed rubbish is 8 cubic meters, respectively, 500 thousand tons - 4 million cubic meters. A mountain with a height of 40 m will appear on the site. ”

Most likely, several more similar sites will be built near Moscow, and waste from one of the administrative districts of the capital will be collected in Lyubertsy, he suggests.

Igor Fraynt also notes that garbage collection in a remote region will lead to a multiple increase in the tariff for Muscovites. Recall, from January 1, 2019, for the first time, a separate item for the collection and removal of waste will appear in bills of tenants, which constitute about 50% of payments for waste management. Thus, the scheme proposed by the federal law for reducing such payments, provided that the HOA sorts waste, for residents of Moscow, will become hardly realizable, the expert believes. According to "Kommersant", the metropolitan government intends to subsidize the tariff increase in order to alleviate the burden on Muscovites.